An Economy of Trust: How Transparency Is Changing the Tech Industry

Image courtesy RobinHood.org

The building of customer trust has always been the mark of a good business, and its importance has only become more pronounced with the widespread ubiquity of the internet. But the amount of innate trust we place in our technology has grown tenfold since the early days of AOL and Yahoo!, when hardware could hardly keep track of our names, much less our daily habits.

In the current tech landscape, trust is — as the industry trends analysts at Hyper Island phrase it — a “high-value currency.” And it’s true: How many companies have experienced irreparable brand fallout due to breaches of public trust? While it’s possible for businesses like Uber and Apple to carry on even after these trust-related disasters in the public eye, these kinds of missteps can mean the difference between success and failure in this new trust-based technology industry.

It’s an absolute necessity that tech businesses earn the trust of their customers, but we’re still firing shots in the dark when it comes to finding a qualitative approach to building trust. How far, for instance, does an individual company need to go to make their customers trust them? Should they implement full transparency, or is there a certain point to which corporate practices should remain classified? The truth is that the answer isn’t always clear-cut.

What Makes Your Audience Trust Your Business?

What we do know about trustworthiness in technology is that it doesn’t start at the corporate policy level. Think about how much trust it takes, for instance, for a user to give you access to their personal information. Just getting to this point requires an initial sense of trust, which businesses attempt to develop in a variety of ways.

This is where the system fragments into thousands of possibilities. In the non-profit space, for instance, we’ve noticed that trust works in mysterious ways. While you might think that audiences would trust non-profit organizations more than other businesses, non-profits are actually held to a higher standard of transparency. When people are donating their money, after all, they want to make sure that a majority of it will go directly to the cause.

This is why storytelling is so important to non-profits. Take the Robin Hood Foundation, whose website homepage features in big bold letters: “100% OF YOUR DONATION GOES DIRECTLY TO FIGHTING POVERTY.” For the non-profit space, this information is paramount to success.

What’s important to note, however, is that there’s no one “trust threshold” that will apply to every industry, much less every business. While a revenue statistic might work wonders for Robin Hood, it may do absolutely nothing for your business. When it comes to your own company, focus on what makes your business trustworthy, and make an effort to deliver that to your audience.

Designing for Trust

Sometimes, the most important trust you can develop doesn’t start with corporate transparency, but with smaller-scale design decisions. If you require users to sign into your software by creating an account, for instance, are certain that you’ve built a trustworthy enough experience to incentivize them to move forward? Even the smallest of design details can tell a user that your software is trustworthy, from quick loading times to smooth UX flow, all the way to clear navigational cues.

E-Commerce is one example of a space where design cues are tremendously important for building trust. When asking users for their credit card number, even the inclusion of a small image — indicating that you’re TRUSTe certified — can mean the difference between a conversion and a pass. User reviews, product zoom, customer support – all of these have become necessities in the E-Commerce space because they provide a company with trustworthiness that they need to make their sales.

The Potential of Transparency

At the moment, it’s difficult to tell where transparency is taking us. As giant corporations like Uber begin to feel the trust-diminishing sting of public missteps, and as we give our gadgets more access to our daily lives, it seems that trustworthiness will have to scale up at a similar rate. For now, we don’t have to look any further than the social media publishing platform Buffer to get a good idea of what full transparency might look like. In a recent interview, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich discussed the company’s extreme “open” policy, which publishes everything from employee salaries to company emails:

“When we published all salaries online, I think in that month we had 4,000 people wanting to work for Buffer. People were coming to us and saying ‘I know more about your company than about the company that I’m working for right now.’”

By keeping everything transparent, Buffer allows for a more streamlined flow of ideas. But their transparency also has a secondary effect: It imbues Buffer with a trustworthiness that they wouldn’t otherwise possess. If they’re willing to publish their employee salaries, after all, why would they have any reason to deceive users about something as simple as a license agreement or pricing model?

The important thing to note here is that Buffer is still treading into unexplored terrain. While all-around transparency can be a boon for smaller companies, it’s wholly possible that such policies would fall flat in the context of larger organizations. Still, when it comes to developing customer trust and improving internal collaboration, businesses might learn a thing or two from Buffer’s practices.

For now, trustworthiness in technology is still a complex puzzle. Every business will need to work out their own unique solutions to build customer trust, whether it involves complete transparency or smaller UX cues. Until we’ve developed a wide library of best practices for customer trustworthiness across industries, there’s still plenty of room for experimentation in the field. One thing remains certain, though: If you’re not prioritizing trust in your own tech business, you’re behind the curve no matter how revolutionary your product might be.

Himanshu Sareen is the CEO of Icreon Tech, a global IT consultancy delivering business solutions and custom applications.